Foxvideo Productions

Media Production

To be honest I’ve not had anything interesting to blog (or rant!) about recently. I’ve taken on 2 more people for website build and maintain, both Christian individuals who wanted to get their information out and onto the web. Tony Packer, a missionary working mainly in and around Serbia and Tony Chamberlain, I first met Tony Chamberlain over 50 years ago when he was a Minister of Romford Elim church, we’ve crossed paths several times over the years and he’s now based in Gloucester, just 20 miles from me.

I’m still enjoying learning, using and working with Rapidweaver 7, it really suits my way of producing websites without being a ‘code guru’ although my working knowledge of CSS is improving and I’m dropping in bits of CSS code to pages. A major layout problem occurred recently that did take some detective work to solve on Tony Chamberlain’s site, I didn’t like the way Google had indexed it (not their fault, but mine) so I needed to change the index.html site and page title, suddenly all my page headings dropped below the menu banner, it took a few hours to work out the text change had added too many characters and all I had to do was reduce the text size by a fraction of a point to solve it!

A recent announcement from Google and the latest web browser updates has meant moving all the sites I maintain from http to https (note the little green padlock in the browser bar above), 2 of my sites were on HeartInternet who wanted £45 per year per Domain for this service, my remaining sites are with One.com who offered https for free - it was a no brainer to move the 2 sites from Heart to One.com. It can be quite stressful moving Domain hosts, one wrong click or checkbox missed and it could all go wrong, I’ve moved one site so far with all the mailboxes moved over and links changed to https, one site still to go if my heart holds out!

Video and editing work is very slow although it’s the time of year for the Peace and Hope Trust AGM and I was asked to produce 3 short videos from stills taken over the last 12 months in Nicaragua. I’ve done these for around 6 or 7 years now and it’s always difficult to try and come up with something different using just stills. Many of the images are 12 or 16 megapixels, well over the 4000 pixel size that FCP 7 allows, so this time I used FCPX. The script had been sent to me as a Word doc ahead of the P&H Field Director coming in to record his voiceover so I used Tim Dashwood’s Scratch Track App to give me an .aiff to lay down to work with, this App is (was!) a real help although it’s now been sadly discontinued from the App Store.

I’d usually upload draft edits for Peace and Hope to Vimeo but this time round I didn’t renew my Vimeo Pro subscription, instead I’m now using Amazon Web Services S3, there’s a free trial for 12 months and then a monthly cost (usually around a few pence depending on use) and although it takes bit of understanding to use, AWS really seems the way to go for ‘warehousing’ and storage. I’ll post the Peace and Hope video here after the AGM.

Slightly off topic, one recent purchase has made a massive difference. We have 2 phone lines here and one of them was constantly ringing with junk calls, up to 8 a day, a call minder that showed the calling number helped but call centres are now getting round this by showing legitimate numbers. I’d spotted a news item recently that BT had introduced a new service called BT Call Protect along with a dedicated phone that would solve the problem, BT were offering the phone (BT4600) for £39.99 although Amazon were offering the same item on Prime for £33.61, as Prime users we ordered through Prime and the new phone arrived the next day. That was 8 weeks ago - we’ve not had a single junk call since!

The phone screens all calls, you can add 200 personal numbers that come through as normal but unknown numbers have to give a name, if they are genuine the phone then rings and asks if you want to allow the call, a button press lets the call through and you can then permanently allow (or block) that number, there’s an answerphone built in and lots of other features you’ll need to read the instruction book about but it’s well worth the investment - definitely one of our all time best buys and that, just about brings you up to date with my last (quiet!) few months.

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